Government trying to play God with proposed medical research law, Bishop warns

Madrid, Spain, Nov 7, 2006 / 12:00 am (CNA).- Bishop Jesus Sanz Montes of Huesca warned the Spanish government this week that its proposed law on medical research seeks to take the place of God in the way it “fools around with life,” deciding who will live and who won’t.

“No matter how they shroud it in confusing, flashy words that are meant to be ambiguous, fooling around like this with life, as the government’s proposed law on medical research seeks to do, is an attack on life in that it places economic and partisan ideological interests above the most basic common good - human life - and against the most vulnerable of human beings - the embryo,” the bishop said in statement.

Bishop Sanz noted that man has attempted to play God repeatedly throughout history, but that today we are facing, “a situation that has never been on such a massive scale.” “To play God today is to be the owner of human life, to control that life in all of his stages and all of its forms. A control that decides who must be eliminated and when,” he emphasized.

Repeating the statement of the Executive Committee of the Bishops’ Conference of Spain, Bishop Sanz stressed that the Church is not opposed to scientific advances, but rather to those, “forms of research that include the programmed elimination of already existing human beings, even though they may have not yet been born.”

“History itself has condemned this science in the past and it will do so in the future,” the bishops said in their statement, “not only because it is deprived of the light of God, but also because it is deprived of humanity.”